In this issue:

• New website!

• A behind-the-scenes note

• Amanda Mohlenhoff: The Life-Changing Magic of a Cr …

Welcome to a very special and very new Sabbatical! In celebration of crossing the 200 subscriber mark, there’s now a totally relaunched and reimagined Sabbatical website!

New website!

Here’s what you’ll find:

• Every Sabbatical interview I’ve ever done all in one place with all of the advice and candor you’ve come to expect.

• Every essay including the difference between digital nomads and sabbaticals, the benefits of a modular career, and more.

• A sneak peek at some of the comprehensive research and guides I’m working on — vote for the one you want first!

With a new site comes more goodies: this newsletter will now be sent every other Wednesday, alternating interviews and essays.

A behind-the-scenes note

Our lives and careers are full of stops and starts and explorations that help us figure out the best path for us. Sabbatical has embraced this spirit — exploring without knowing exactly where it's headed.

But now, some clarity that’s come from more than 20 interviews and 7 issues of this newsletter: Sabbatical is for ambitious people. I mean that in two senses:

Ambitious in your career. So much of our career discourse teeters on a kind of nihilism that views hard work as something to be totally avoided. Best to “quiet quit”, FIRE, or start some business from your laptop with the goal of working 5 hours a week in Thailand or something. Sabbatical embraces that it’s one of the joys of life to work hard on a problem you care about with people you respect. We take sabbaticals not to avoid, but to recharge.

Ambitious with your life. I have an ongoing text thread with some dads in my life where we just forward social media advice posts (usually from men in the 30s) that totally ignore that their advice is impractical if you are raising a family.

Surely you’ve seen videos of the super jacked dude who has optimized every hour of his day in the name of health. Or the travel influencer who bops from country to country endlessly. There’s a kind of advice-industrial complex that acts as if commitment to anyone other than yourself is not worth it. Or, as Derek states below, there is no one in your life worth sacrificing anything for.

Sabbatical acknowledges that it’s fun to be a parent. Or to commit yourself your local community. Or any of the other things that fulfill us. Our lives rarely have a singular focus.

Speaking of, let’s get to this week’s interview:

Amanda Mohlenhoff: The Life-Changing Magic of a Creative Sabbatical

There are many types of sabbaticals, and in this interview, we explore the creative kind. Amanda was working for a tech company when she was so burned out she couldn’t even look at her laptop anymore. During COVID, she left and began a journey that included:

• Producing her own show complete with costumes, music, and dance.

• Learning how to be a self-starter again and structure her time

• Getting back in touch with her creative side through a series of collabs with friends

• Exploring the work that would energize her, rather than exhaust her, returning to the same industry with a new approach — she even got her new company to cover a career coach!

Choice quotes:

• “I was really seeking novelty. I knew that the antidote to boredom and depression is newness and learning new skills and building this confidence and allowing myself to be afraid.”

• “I thought maybe I became exhausted because I was working for someone else's dream. And so then I produced my own, I wrote a musical and it was really successful.“

• “Sometimes it's time to focus on other aspects of your life, your one life that you have before you die forever.”

👇 I think you’ll like it